Vintage photos show how the role of women in the workforce has evolved in the last 100 years

Jobs commonly held by women included postal clerks, who sorted letters and packages. While it wasn't uncommon for women to work in post offices, very few women actually delivered mail.

The US Postal Service reported that in 1920, only 5% of the nation's 943 village carriers were women. 

As local postal delivery was gradually phased out in favor of larger city delivery, most of the remaining women village carriers either resigned or were transferred to clerk positions.

The US Department of Labor reported that in 1920, women made up about 20% of the labor force, an increase from previous generations.

Many of them were involved in the production and manufacturing of clothing, food products, and tobacco products.

Women of color, on the other hand, were largely employed in agriculture and domestic service work for much of the early 20th century.

Many women took typing courses to secure higher-paying jobs as secretaries or typists in clerical offices rather than working in factories.

The Encyclopedia of Chicago reported that working conditions, wages, and hours in clerical work were seen as the best at the time.

Clerical work attracted young, literate, mostly white women who would work as typists until they were married, only to be replaced by other young unmarried women when they left their jobs to raise their families.

As the popularity of silent films began to rise, women found work behind the scenes on movie sets.

The Women Film Pioneers Project wrote that a 1923 edition of "Business Woman" published a list of 29 different jobs that women held in the film industry, apart from actresses.

Job positions included that of a typist, secretary to the stars and executive secretary, costume designer, seamstress, telephone operator, hairdresser, script girl, film retoucher, title writer, publicity writer, musician, film editor, director, and producer, among others.

However, most occupations were seen solely as a precursor to marriage.

Among married white women of both native and immigrant backgrounds, only around 10% were in the workforce, History reported.

It was more common for married women of color to hold jobs outside the home, however.

Inspired by the Civilian Conservation Corps, which only allowed men to join in exchange for free room and board, Eleanor Roosevelt started "SheSheShe" camps to help women gain employment in environmental conservation, The Corps Network reported.

Many women during the Great Depression found work as secretaries, teachers, telephone operators, and nurses.

Women also earned incomes by sewing clothes in Works Progress Administration (WPA) sewing rooms. The rooms manufactured products such as men's trousers, boys' coveralls, baby clothes, women's dresses, and diapers. 

During World War II, women assisted in manufacturing wartime necessities like gas masks.

Forbes reported that between 1940 and 1945, women's participation in the US workforce increased from 27% to nearly 37%. 

Before the war, women were largely in traditionally "female" fields such as nursing and teaching.

After Pearl Harbor, many women entered the armed forces at astonishing rates. In 1943, more than 310,000 women worked in the US aircraft industry, making up 65% of the industry's total workforce, History reported.

Before the war began, women made up just 1% of the industry.

A 1935 law titled the National Recovery Act actually required women who held jobs within the government to receive 25% less pay than men in the same jobs.

In 1942, during wartime, the War Labor Board ruled that women would be paid the same as male workers who were now away at war.

However, the war ended before they could receive equal pay.

With no laws to protect female workers from pay inequality, female workers in the 1940s earned around 60% of what their male counterparts made, MarketWatch reported.

Even though there were technically more women in the workforce in 1952 than during the war, women were often paid less and given jobs with less upward mobility than their male counterparts.

Many women were forced to give up the jobs they had worked in during wartime, giving them to male soldiers returning home.

The most popular jobs for women during the 1950s were secretaries, bank tellers or clerical workers, sales clerks, private household workers, and teachers, The Week reported.

Female secretaries in the 1950s gained a reputation for being young and attractive.

In fact, a 1959 quiz from a secretarial training program in Waco, Texas, reposted by The Atlantic, asked women if they have what it takes to be a secretary, including "smiling readily and naturally" and being "usually cheerful" among its requirements. 

Flight attendants during the 1950s became symbols of the golden age of flying — when traveling by air was seen as the height of sophistication and glamour. However, with this "glamorous" career also came a host of sexist protocols.

Condé Nast Traveler reported that women were not allowed to work as flight attendants after they reached the ages of 32 to 35, while male flight attendants could work well into their 60s.

In 1957, Trans World Airlines dropped its no-marriage rule for female flight attendants. However, many airlines continued to only hire non-married female flight attendants.

After women returned home from their secretarial or office jobs, they had another job to do: caring for the children, doing the housekeeping, and, of course, putting a hot dinner in front of their husbands. 

This became known as the "second shift." If women didn't hold office or other jobs during the day, they were relegated to being "housewives."

Many suburban women began selling Tupperware out of their own homes in what became known as "Tupperware parties." 

"Tupperware ... took those moms out of the kitchen where they were 'supposed to be' and let them enter the workforce, and let them have something outside the home," Lorna Boyd, whose mother Sylvia was an at-home Tupperware seller in the 1960s, told the Smithsonian Institution.

In the 1960s, Barbara Walters was a broadcast journalist working in New York City. In 1976, she would become the first woman to anchor a nightly newscast, Variety reported.

Many other women were also joining the journalism field as coverage of the Vietnam War became increasingly widespread.

Smithsonian Magazine reported that "computer girls" became a term for "savvy young women" pursuing careers in computer programming.

Computer programming was seen as "easy" work similar to typing or filing, so many women ended up building the field that would come to be known as software development. 

However, the work was seen as "unskilled."

"Women were seen as an easy, tractable labor force for jobs that were critical and yet simultaneously devalued," technology historian Marie Hicks said in her book "Programmed Inequality," The Guardian reported. 

Title VII was added to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, protecting workers from employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

In 1963, the Equal Pay Act of 1963 was passed in order to protect men and women who perform "substantially equal work in the same establishment" from sex-based wage discrimination.

These measures were especially beneficial to women of color. Up until the 1970s, women of color could be openly discriminated against in the hiring process and were often assigned to providing
"domestic service work" to white families, The Economic Policy Institute reported. 

It meant women were no longer welcome in many computer programming offices. 

"They weren't going to put women workers – seen as low-level drones – in charge of computers," Hicks told The Guardian.

Female computer workers, or "computer girls," were gradually phased out and replaced with men, who received higher salaries and more prestigious job titles.

The Atlantic reported that from 1972 to 1985, the number of women working "professional" jobs increased from 44% to 49%. The number of women working "management" jobs nearly doubled, rising from 20% to 36%. 

However, in 1970, women still did not earn equal wages to men holding the same positions.

After measures were passed that prevented universities and institutions from discriminating against students on the basis of sex, more women were admitted into medical school than in past generations, according to a study published by the British Medical Bulletin.

Other strides were made for women in the late 1970s.

In 1978, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act was passed as an amendment to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which meant that women could start building families without fearing how it would affect their careers.

The Atlantic reported that, in 1985, half of all college graduates were women. However, only 41% of women between the ages of 25 and 44 held full-time year-round jobs.

Even in the mid-1980s, women themselves saw their own careers as inferior to their husbands'.

The Atlantic also cited a 1985 Roper survey that showed only 10% of women said that a husband should turn down a "very good job" in another city "so the wife can continue her job."

In 1984, at the Democratic National Convention held in San Francisco's Moscone Center, Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman nominated as vice president by a major political party.

Women were encouraged to "do it all" — meaning, hold a successful job as well as maintain a happy and healthy marriage and raise children.

Computers became increasingly prevalent, reducing the need for secretaries, bank tellers, and retail workers.

For most earlier decades, women would be married between the ages of 20 and 22, Time reported.

The average age for women to get married rose to 24 in 1990, and by 1997, it was 25.

In 1995, nearly half of all women surveyed for a report by the National Center for Education Statistics said they earned half or more of their total family income. 

Fortune reported that at the start of 2020, 109,000 more women were working than men, and women in the US made up 50.4% of the labor force.

Sectors that traditionally hire women, like healthcare and education, were growing, and other industries previously dominated by men were also hiring more women than ever before.

Forbes reported that 13.8% of mining and logging jobs were held by women, and more women were employed in manufacturing and transportation than in years past.

CNBC reported that more than 2.3 million women in the US left the labor force between February 2020 and January 2021, compared to about 1.8 million men who registered as unemployed.

This placed the women's labor force participation rate at 57%, the lowest rate since 1988, according to the National Women's Law Center.

However, the actual number of women who were unemployed may have been much higher due to those who may have left the labor force but were not actively looking for work.

In January 2021, 275,000 women left the labor force, accounting for 80% of all unemployed workers over the age of 20 that month.

The situation was even worse for women of color.

According to the NWLC, 8.5% of Black women aged 20 and over were unemployed in January 2021, compared to 8.4% in December 2020 and 4.9% in February 2020.

Adversely, the unemployment rate for white men aged 20 and over was 5.5% in January 2021, compared to 5.8% in December 2020 and 2.7% in February 2020. 

A 2024 report by the Independent Women's Forum said that in 16% of all US households, women are the primary or sole "breadwinners." The report also revealed that 29% of households reported that both male and female spouses earned the same amount of money.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics also reported that in 2025, the unemployment rate for women was slightly lower than the rate for men. Women also have a 57.5% participation rate in the labor force, compared to 67.6% for men.

Many women are also starting their own businesses and choosing entrepreneurship over traditional careers.